My Papa Done Told Me

My friend Ken Ball and I have a something very special in common: Separately and continents apart, our fathers kept us out of deep mines.

My father was a mechanic, who worked in mine maintenance, mostly gold mines known as hard-rock mines, all over southern central Africa. Ken is the scion of a long line of coal miners in Pennsylvania.

Whenever there is a mine disaster, like the tragedy this week at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia, Ken and I think of our fathers and thank them.

I dropped out of high school. Soon, I got a job in journalism, but journalism, then as now, can be a fickle business and the pay lousy.

After 18 glorious months of cub reporting, I found myself in Zambia getting by in construction work because my gig as a very junior foreign correspondent had gone south.

I was offered a job at fabulous money as a trainee miner in the Zambian copper mines. They paid what was called the “copper bonus” and it had, from the mine owners’ point of view, gotten out of hand.

The defense buildup in the United States had pushed the price of copper beyond all expectations. Copper capitalism was all the rage.

I was already spending the money in my head, bonding in that machismo way that miners have. The typewriter would be traded for a jack hammer. I’d be a man’s man with a pocket full of “copper bonus” money to prove it.

I wrote my father and told him that job insecurity and money woes would soon be over, I was “going down the mines.”

My father had a faltering grip on spelling and grammar, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t express himself elegantly. I believe that writing, like musicality, is innate.

If hard-mining is about the judicious use of dynamite, my father’s response letter was as explosive.

Its gist was: I’ve never stopped you in your folly, especially in leaving school. But for God’s sake, don’t go down a mine. Those places aren’t for human beings. I’ve been forced to work on them most of my life, and I can tell you that mines are no places for human beings. Please don’t do it.

Just about the same time, in the late 1950s, in faraway Pennsylvania, Ken Ball was getting about the same advice from his father. Ken finished his schooling and went on to a distinguished career in science and engineering. I went back to the newspaper trade.

The basic dynamic of mining is at odds with safety: It is to extract as much ore or coal as possible with as little cost. Safety is the usual casualty. Owners skirt the rules for profit. And miners skirt them for much the same reason: bonuses.

Because mines are almost always company towns, it’s hard for individual miners to blow the whistle on dangerous practices if everyone is winking at the regulations.

More government regulations are simply more rules to ignore. The most positive safety enhancement is an old one: an active union.

Upper Big Branch is a non-union mine and the worst accidents tend to be in non-union mines.

Unions are good at enforcing irksome work rules. Arguably, there may be no reason for teachers to unionize. There’s a good reason for having a third party in the mine: safety. Miners have no loyalty to government inspectors, but they do to their own union.

A safe mine is an oxymoron. The earth is as lethal as the sea. When you start moving it around, there is treachery down below.

Things are much better than they were years ago; better equipment and rules, which if implemented, help. But the history of King Coal is not pretty. In America alone, more than 100,000 men — until recently, it was men only — have died in the unforgiving earth to keep us warm and their families fed.

For the miners in Appalachia, it’s a special way of life: church, a mobile home, television, tattoos and close relations within small communities. It’s also a way of life, a culture and work that, in the age of keystrokes, makes a man feel, well, like a man.

As for my father, about three months after he cautioned me off the life below ground, he fell down a goldmine shaft and broke his back. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Comments

I read your article in the [Helena, Mont.] Independent Record about your father keeping you out of the mines(my husband’s father did the same by keeping him out of the Butte mine); the necessity of unions for mine workers; and “arguably, there may be no reason for teachers to unionize.”

I wanted you to understand how important teachers’ unions are to the teachers.

When I started teaching in North Carolina in l964, I was making $3,460 a year. Yes, I put in 12 months of work and time in the nine and a half months I was in the classroom.

When I left teaching in 2005, the pay scale was at $73,000 in Montana(Helena); and that salary was achieved after 41 years of teaching at the Middle School(Junior High)– and yes, I look pretty good for a 68-year- old, finally retired teacher(I still miss my students, so I am subbing now at the three high schools).

Unions are one of the reasons salaries are going up…it is called collective bargaining which keeps the interaction between school boards and teachers at a amicable level.

The second reason a teacher needs a teachers’ union concerns working conditions.

When I started teaching in 1964 in North Carolina, teacher unions were forbidden. I arrived at school at 7:30 a.m. and left at 4:00 p.m. taking stacks of papers with me. I did not get a coffee break in the morning or in the afternoon. I ate lunch with my students and they had to whisper the whole meal, and I had to make sure they did. I had to wear a dress or skirt; absolutely no dress slacks of any kind were allowed, not even a pantsuit.

We were required to visit the homes of each of our students(30-plus,)if the parent did not attend a parent-teacher conference at school. Many times I was greeted by a parent who took me to the bedroom for a conference, because the other parent was lying on the couch in the den watching TV.

I was a very scared 22-year-old teacher. I had no recourse at all; for if I went to the administration and complained, I would be fired.

I know tenure is a bad word to most of the non-teaching world, but as a teacher, it was job security–I would not be fired by a school board trying to save money.

We were told by our college professors to not receive a master’s until we were given tenure because that degree would mean we would cost the district too much money, and we would not be hired.

Bingo! One day in 1975, I woke up and was living and breathing in Helena, Montana.

When I was hired as a teacher in the district, the HEA Union president gave the new teachers a speech about the benefits of becoming a member. I could not sign up fast enough. I was told that I would receive coffee breaks, a 30 minute preparation period, and a duty free lunch. I also was told I would not have to wear a dress or skirt to teach–but I remember that was a hard one to give up.

I believe teacher unions are important for the aforementioned reasons. Yes, there are examples of ineffective teaching occurring every day in Helena(as well as doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs), but that is because a principal or an administrator will not take the time to write out a mandatory improvement plan for those teachers who do not meet the evaluation goals. Many times they look the other way because too much trouble for them but really it is an vital part of their job description. If a teacher is “written up” and given examples of how to improve their teaching practices and he or she does not, then that teacher is removed from teaching; tenured or not tenured.

I must get back to the class for the bell just rang( I am writing this in my duty-free lunch period).

I read your article in the [Helena, Mont.] Independent Record about your father keeping you out of the mines(my husband’s father did the same by keeping him out of the Butte mine); the necessity of unions for mine workers; and “arguably, there may be no reason for teachers to unionize.”

I wanted you to understand how important teachers’ unions are to the teachers.

When I started teaching in North Carolina in l964, I was making $3,460 a year. Yes, I put in 12 months of work and time in the nine and a half months I was in the classroom.

When I left teaching in 2005, the pay scale was at $73,000 in Montana(Helena); and that salary was achieved after 41 years of teaching at the Middle School(Junior High)– and yes, I look pretty good for a 68-year- old, finally retired teacher(I still miss my students, so I am subbing now at the three high schools).

Unions are one of the reasons salaries are going up…it is called collective bargaining which keeps the interaction between school boards and teachers at a amicable level.

The second reason a teacher needs a teachers’ union concerns working conditions.

When I started teaching in 1964 in North Carolina, teacher unions were forbidden. I arrived at school at 7:30 a.m. and left at 4:00 p.m. taking stacks of papers with me. I did not get a coffee break in the morning or in the afternoon. I ate lunch with my students and they had to whisper the whole meal, and I had to make sure they did. I had to wear a dress or skirt; absolutely no dress slacks of any kind were allowed, not even a pantsuit.

We were required to visit the homes of each of our students(30-plus,)if the parent did not attend a parent-teacher conference at school. Many times I was greeted by a parent who took me to the bedroom for a conference, because the other parent was lying on the couch in the den watching TV.

I was a very scared 22-year-old teacher. I had no recourse at all; for if I went to the administration and complained, I would be fired.

I know tenure is a bad word to most of the non-teaching world, but as a teacher, it was job security–I would not be fired by a school board trying to save money.

We were told by our college professors to not receive a master’s until we were given tenure because that degree would mean we would cost the district too much money, and we would not be hired.

Bingo! One day in 1975, I woke up and was living and breathing in Helena, Montana.

When I was hired as a teacher in the district, the HEA Union president gave the new teachers a speech about the benefits of becoming a member. I could not sign up fast enough. I was told that I would receive coffee breaks, a 30 minute preparation period, and a duty free lunch. I also was told I would not have to wear a dress or skirt to teach–but I remember that was a hard one to give up.

I believe teacher unions are important for the aforementioned reasons. Yes, there are examples of ineffective teaching occurring every day in Helena(as well as doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs), but that is because a principal or an administrator will not take the time to write out a mandatory improvement plan for those teachers who do not meet the evaluation goals. Many times they look the other way because too much trouble for them but really it is an vital part of their job description. If a teacher is “written up” and given examples of how to improve their teaching practices and he or she does not, then that teacher is removed from teaching; tenured or not tenured.

I must get back to the class for the bell just rang( I am writing this in my duty-free lunch period).

I thought Llewellyn King’s article about his father keeping him out of the mines was fantastic (‘Fathers kept sons from ‘going down the mines,’ ’ The Oregonian, April 11, 2010). It was both informative and moving.

I was mystified, though, that King would choose to take a swipe at teachers unions in that particular article. That comment did not just come from left field, it was from somewhere in the parking lot.

While teachers may not face the extreme danger of miners, negotiating, in essence, what sort of home and life one can provide for a family are stakes too high to negotiate as one? Many negotiating as one improves the odds.

I am glad that King’s father loved him enough to tell him the truth about his lifelong profession, and it is tragic that his point was proved at such a high personal cost.

I thought Llewellyn King’s article about his father keeping him out of the mines was fantastic (‘Fathers kept sons from ‘going down the mines,’ ’ The Oregonian, April 11, 2010). It was both informative and moving.

I was mystified, though, that King would choose to take a swipe at teachers unions in that particular article. That comment did not just come from left field, it was from somewhere in the parking lot.

While teachers may not face the extreme danger of miners, negotiating, in essence, what sort of home and life one can provide for a family are stakes too high to negotiate as one? Many negotiating as one improves the odds.

I am glad that King’s father loved him enough to tell him the truth about his lifelong profession, and it is tragic that his point was proved at such a high personal cost.

Posted by: DotComa
April 9, 2010 at 7:42 AM
I was raised in a mining town; and in my younger years worked side by side with my Dad, who was a miner. I can say that Mr. King has expressed my feelings exactly as to how mines and unions and miners operate and feel about their jobs and lives. I am from Canada and the unions have done well by their mine workers, helping make mines relatively safe; and in my town, attaining yearly earnings of over U.S. $100,000 during the recent boom times. Even though this is very tempting money, it has allowed miners to get their kids a good education and into a safer and more pleasant line of work. Thanks for sharing this story [in the Winnipeg Free Press], Mr. King

Posted by: DotComa
April 9, 2010 at 7:42 AM
I was raised in a mining town; and in my younger years worked side by side with my Dad, who was a miner. I can say that Mr. King has expressed my feelings exactly as to how mines and unions and miners operate and feel about their jobs and lives. I am from Canada and the unions have done well by their mine workers, helping make mines relatively safe; and in my town, attaining yearly earnings of over U.S. $100,000 during the recent boom times. Even though this is very tempting money, it has allowed miners to get their kids a good education and into a safer and more pleasant line of work. Thanks for sharing this story [in the Winnipeg Free Press], Mr. King

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